Search Results for 'Cllr Seamus Weir'

Despite agreeing at the December meeting of the Ballina Electoral Area Committee that the committee would hold monthly meetings from now on rather than the bi-monthly meeting schedule that they had been using, actually agreeing to do so caused problems yesterday. At the February meeting of the committee, there was an item on the agenda to set the day and time each month that the committee would meeting.

The members of the Ballina Electoral Area committee will meet each month from now on. The electoral area committee, which comprises the elected county councillors from the Ballina area and the Méara of Ballina Town Council, along with a number of officials from Mayo County Council, had previously met once every two months.

The ongoing saga of potholes on roads around Ballina was raised once again at the Ballina Electoral Area meeting this week when Fine Gael councillor , Jarlath Munnelly said, “I may sound like a broken record in respect of this but the problem of the potholes has to be fixed. If we don’t get it sorted in the next short while, it will be 10 times worse by the time we can do it again if we get a winter like last year”.

The HSE has been accused of operating in a “cloak of secrecy” this week akin to what happened during the Cold War. Fianna Fáil TD Dara Calleary said elected representatives were finding it extremely difficult to get information from the service and pointed out that although the board of the HSE were all sacked in April, the situation was getting worse.

A decision by the National Ambulance Service to stop the provision of patient transport to dialysis and cancer patients within the western area has been over-ruled by the Minister for Health Dr James Reilly. The HSE has been accused of “acting in an independent way” and without Dr Reilly’s consent on this matter and there is now a question mark over how the service dealt with the situation.

The members of the Ballina Electoral Area this week paid tribute to their former Mayo County Council colleague Michelle Mulherin on her election to the 31st Dáil. Dep Mulherin was first elected to represent the people of the Ballina area in the county council in 2004, before successfully retaining her seat in 2009.

The devil was in the detail as the HSE finally disclosed its cutback plans for Mayo General Hospital this week, which will include cuts in staff numbers through “moratoriums and natural staff turnovers”, reduced working hours for temporary staff (amounting to 7,000 working hours every week off the rosters of 400 temporary staff throughout the region), bed closures to be achieved through essential-only admissions to hospital with day assessment prioritised and direct cuts on elective surgery that will directly impact on patient waiting times.

The long running saga of the N26 linking Ballina to the N5 and beyond is set to run on for at least another year before a new preferred route for the road emerges. The item was up for discussion at the September meeting of the Ballina Electoral Area Committee this week where Tony McNulty, road design senior executive engineer with Mayo County Council, answered a number of questions from the elected councillors in the area.

The process of electing a new chairman of HSE West, the health forum that represents Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo, Leitrim, Clare, and Limerick, took all of 30 seconds at the AGM this week when sitting chair Cllr Padraig Conneely, Fine Gael, and former Mayor of Galway, was re-elected unanimously without contest.

“All lands will be frozen until a route is chosen and accepted by the council,” was the stark reality that senior engineer for Mayo County Council, Noel Burke, told members of the Ballina Electoral Area this week. The members of the committee had been debating the issue of the new Crossmolina bypass which has caused plenty of debate in the area over the past number of months. When the route chosen by the council executive for the proposed new bypass was rejected by the council, all potential routes and lands around them were frozen for development.